Month: June 2017

I have known Alice Shields forever. We are tangentially connected, both having lived in the same street albeit at different times, Alice being one of Eden Street’s more exotic residents.

Eden Street no longer exists, but when it did you could find it in Sunderland’s East End. Like most East End’s in big towns it’s contrasts were violent, which is to say it had an infection in it that could induce either lethargy or madness.

I have created a legend in my mind and consequently believe it to be true, that Eden Street at one time had been the scene of a dark mystery which put the street on some celebrity status at one time.

The mystery began on 14th January 1949 – before I was born – concerning a certain Alice Burslem who was a thirty-three year old dancer and entertainer who adopted the stage name Molly Moselle. To avoid confusion, I will call her what most people called her: Alice.

Alice was appearing at the Sunderland’s Empire Theatre in an Ivor Novello show called The Dancing Years and was infatuated with a performer in the show. What his feelings for her was is not recorded.

To most of Eden Street’s residents it’s dullness was soothing, a place that grows on you every day, but to Alice it’s atmosphere shed a gentle melancholy upon her soul like the darkness that comes with the night.

There was always plenty to do to keep her busy when not working at the theatre: endless housework chores like dusting, polishing, ironing, or (in her mind) running down Eden Street full pelt screaming all the way.

She gave the impression of one trapped inside a cloud, forever in a state of tranquil and lethargic sedateness which effects were similar to that brought on by valium. This mundane existence suited the majority of Eden’s residents although not Alice, who periodically found herself under some pressing obligation to be anywhere else but where she actually was.

To ease the effects, Alice took to going for long walks. First, about town and not always with an appointed destination in mind but using ideas for maps. Sometimes she would end up at her mother’s house. At other times, and often at night, it would be the turn of some other not so close relative, bemused as to what the meaning of a visit at such an unsocial hour could be. In all cases however, it was always within the narrow compass of the town boundary.

Later though, she began to expand her horizons. What started as almost a recreational pursuit, soon hardened into something of a walking phenomenon until finally, she became a fully-fledged traveller and walked clear out of town and didn’t come back.

It was as if Alice and Molly were two difference people. While her fellow performers at the Empire theatre described the women they knew as Molly as a “happy woman with a strong personality”. Away from the theatre her Alice persona was just the opposite, her unhappiness manifest on her brow.

As the rumours about her and what might have happened started to arouse suspicion, the Sunderland C.I.D. thought perhaps that she had lost her memory and was safe, somewhere in England.

The police followed other suggestions such as suicide, or perhaps she had fallen into the river and drowned. Popular opinion had it that she had run off with a “fancy man”, one of the cast from the travelling show. The “fancy man” however, that Alice had her eye on was still around and could not assist the police in their enquiries. They found nothing

When the disappearance of Alice hit the headlines, Sunderland police had no shortage of offers of help to find her. They searched the town looking for her but nothing was to come of any of the alleged sightings.

But on the afternoon of Wednesday 12th October 1950, the police motor launch made a grisly find in the River Wear. A note from the inquest said the body was that of Alice.

On Monday 17th October 1950 her mortal remains were laid to rest in Bishopwearmouth cemetery. This concise summary of the facts is all I have been able to learn. Such is the contagion of popular opinion hereabouts that Alice was murdered and so many hooded figures of the female gender had on occasion been seen in these environs, that there either there must have been a veritable convent of hooded women or some other explanation must be sort.

And so it was with no knowledge of the above episode or the mysterious hooded woman, that my family, and I with them, moved to the former home of Alice Burslem at 12 Eden Street in Hendon in the middle of October 1955 from Pallion, as the Register of Electors, Polling District N of that year, will testify. I was 5 years old.

I cannot reconcile the ghostly fancies of a few impressionable people in our own enlightened times, but one night in my bedroom I had a night fancy of my own. I saw a strange woman where no strange women should be. I remember her face, her hair, and her bare feet and clothes which were wet, yet she left no imprint on the bare floorboards. There were no words spoken, only an awkward trembling that I knew should not be noticed.

Another detail which almost escaped my notice, had it not so contrasted so sharply with the pale pallor of her skin, was the crudely bandaged wrists, which effect was similar to that which Duncan awoke in Lady Macbeth when she marvelled at his having so much blood in him. I reached under my pillow and brought out a silver half-crown, the sum of all my worldly goods, and offered it to the dread lady.

This is the most ghostly time of night when even the shadows shrink from themselves; a very dead time of the night. There is too, a tranquil quality about this hour, as familiar objects begin to emerge from the slowly changing shadows of night and the raving from the lower floor has ceased. But apart from that, there is too, an awful feeling of stillness and solitude.

Sometimes late at night, voices droned up to the loft where I slept from the room below. At that age, night time can seem like the deadliest time. In the darkness, when these conferences of the night were going on, it seemed that either people were totally unconscious or wildly raving. I was prone to night-mares and drifted somewhere in between waking and sleeping. My breath would come in short and shallow gasps as I lay quite still listening with a hushed and solemn fear.

Quite possibly I was imagining it all. Sometimes when we are in that disturbed state of mind between sleep and wakefulness and troubled by night terrors, do we not have something in common with the insane in that we jumble events and personages, times and places like a mad person? And do we not try vexedly to account for them or excuse them just as the insane do in their waking delusions?

There was an strange inconsistency in that time of quiet. The silence grew in that gloomy darkness into something very oppressive. As to my exact age, I cannot tell except that I seem to remember that I slept in a cot at this time and the bars of the cot increased my sense of isolation.

The more silent it became the more I imagined that I could hear noises. To overcome this I made my own noise, rocking myself rhythmically to and fro while the cot advanced across the floor by degrees until it hit the wall with a gentle bump and went on bumping to the rhythm of my heart beat.

A slight movement appeared in the chest of drawers but no remark issued from it. In the gloom, I lay looking at it unable to move, every faculty that I possessed gathered up and lost in that one seeing faculty. Let it be remembered that solid furniture is not easy to move and that it has this advantage in consequence, that there is no fear of upsetting it.

I shared the same bedroom with my 2 brothers at opposite ends of a cavernous loft. There was just a suggestion of some hint of something monstrous hiding underneath the bed.

There was another smaller room, mostly filled with the paraphernalia of war: gas masks, rusty old junk, and live rifle rounds. Both rooms were within sight of the other, with an intervening dark tract of passageway. At the top of this, was the great void of a dark stairwell hiding like a murderous trap for the unwary which curved it’s way down to the gloomy lower landing.

Then came a composite sound, partly of the purring of an immense cat, and partly as if someone was taking a rasping file to a piece of wood which echoed at regular intervals around the room. It was the sound of my brother snoring.

The furniture too seemed alive. Turning away was no help, for what was in daylight a harmless chest of draws, in the night turned into a stealthy vicious thing which aspect was horribly out of temper. Together we out-watched the long night until presently, I fell fast asleep until the rising sun slanted in through the curtains in the broad daylight.

Some memories are like your teeth which never stop tormenting you from the day you cut them. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember it. Maybe it was worse. Such are the impressions that such things stamp themselves on a childish heart. I did not fully understand what was going on at this time. There was only a strange sense of the frustrated energy of dam about to burst free and when it did, all would be swept away before it.

Many things acquire bad names undeservedly and every house has noises. But if you are the kind of person who wanted to believe in things that go bump in the night without any body having bumped them. And if you had a liking for hearing footsteps on stairs, where no feet were treading. And as you are lying in bed in the half-light, if you saw faces in the wallpaper which had striking resemblances to human looks, why 12 Eden Street, Hendon, would be the house for you.

At this late stage, I am more inclined to be more unsure than ever of the frontier between real events of the one that I have created in my head. The bare facts we realise, do not tell the whole story. We need the assistance of fiction to do justice to the truth. Not in every case can cause and effect be satisfactorily joined together by any theory of mine. There are mysteries in life, and the conditions of it, which human science has not fathomed yet.

Dreams have obsolescence built in. Our dreams, hopes, and aspirations are still preserved there in the past, like coins thrown hopefully down a deep dark wishing well waiting for us to retrieve them. Mostly we will grow out of them. Those wishes sometimes prove themselves to have been miserably imperfect and are likened in later years to the petrified votive offerings of stone teddy bears, hats and old socks at Mother Shiptons Cave in Knarsborough. Sometimes they come back to haunt us.

The mortal remains of Alice lie not 5 yards from a favourite bench in Sunderland’s Minster’s churchyard, overlooking what used to be St. Mary’s school. My school. Once the pole and axis of the old town, it is a good place to sit and reflect. That the inscription on the gravestone can be easily read is down to skill of the mason and more particularly, because of its situation in the lea of the Minster, formerly known as Bishopwearmouth Parish Church.

Alice’s simple stone monument is unremarkable amid all the others save that it tilts drunkenly at a precarious angle, as if trying to the attract attention of passers bye and threatens to topple over at any moment, oppressed both by force of gravity, the weight of ages, and perhaps too by that sadness that was her burden in life.

Come morning, any morning, when you feel like your brain belongs to a sleep-over guest at a drunken house-party; still partly in-thrall to the carnival madness of Dream Land gradually waking up to the promise that a new day holds: to rise, shine, and be reborn; it inaugurates the first of two daily sacraments.

In the radiant glow of morning benediction and you stare into the bathroom mirror, as the sun slowly inches its way up, the new day is best enjoyed with the communion wine of the irreligious. Coffee: close buddy and steadfast friend of both hemispheres of the brain.

As the divine exudative stimulant, drains warmly into the stomach, you greet the dawn as eagerly as a puppy pounces on a shoelace, ready for whatever the day has in store. Outside, the tragedies continue. But inside, all is calm. All is bright. Thus enlivened, the mind sparkles as ideas arrive at full gallop, providing the day’s first opportunity for transgression.

In the bath or shower, we yield to a brief moment of escapism; the mind temporarily waiting at a junction with its indicators on, while the natural gravity of the mind, which dual nature and silent power struggle of good and evil, can be simultaneously at both ends of the human spectrum (bestial and spiritual) deciding which way to go. As when you contemplate the sublime, suddenly and inanely, you belt out a song, and for a brief moment, establish a connection with the annihilated lost child.

That part of your brain that dares you to do something stupid to get it out of your system thus tamed, you are the Philosopher King of the morning rush-hour; the Zen Master of the office or factory floor,

In the evening, the second holy sacrament of absolution comes with the setting sun, where wine absolves and satisfies, bringing forth your inner lunatic and clown, enjoying the intoxication of the jolly sailor, without leaving the comfort of you own home for the rolling main.

“Hush-a-bye baby, on a tree top;
When you grow old, your wages will stop.
When you have spent the little you made;
First to the poorhouse and then to the grave.”

The rhyme is a précis of the fate of many who entered the Gatehouse arch of the Ripon Union Workhouse, which has stood on the site since 1776.

Inside, is almost a self-sufficient world of its own, with garden, laundry, chaplain, doctor, teacher, infirmary, cookhouse, and “Death House” which contained the coffins that for many, was their only way out of a life of degrading and grinding poverty.

It was interesting to note, that it was not only labourers who entered its gates. There were numbered among its inmates, a former master wheelwright, a former gentleman servant, farmers, a master shoe-maker, and many more who had either migrated en masse from rural areas or from Ireland to escape the Irish Potato Famine to the towns, or simply found themselves in old age, or having been widowed, in a similar predicament to abandoned children, vagrants, tramps, prostitutes, and sundry undesirables that society would see out of sight.

The museum is the former Male Vagrants building with a Receiving Ward with 14 cells where the unfortunate down and outs were locked in for the night.

Vagrants were many, and were housed in a separate block of buildings where they were given temporary lodgings for the night and a meal in return for the completion of a designated task. It had nothing in common with the youth hostels of today.

Vagrants were kept on the move – hence tramps – and the Unions collaborated to fix routes along which they traveled, which helped keep track of them for sanitary reasons.

They were given tokens, which they exchanged for food at bread stations along the vagrant routes. Sometimes, these stopping-off places were police stations, but more often they were shops, trusted by the authorities to exchange tokens for bread and not alcohol. The shops recovered their money by returning the tokens to the workhouse.

The workhouse kept a restraining chair in a room to control those who became violent or deranged, and its own van to transport lunatics to asylums elsewhere if they were deemed out of control and a threat to public order.

The workhouse system was the answer to the classic doctrine subscribed to by the social reformer and political moralist Jeremy Bentham: that people would do what was pleasant, and would tend to claim relief rather than working.

This, together with Bentham’s principal that the success of any idea could be measured by whether it secured the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, was what underpinned the drive to discourage people to claim relief, by making the workhouses act as a deterrent by making them as unpleasant as possible.

There are some who feel that Bentham’s doctrine of utilitarianism is alive and well today. It was Bentham’s theory that reformed the country’s poverty and relief system to become The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, with its infamous provision of “less eligibility” – that the situation of able-bodied paupers (read those in receipt of benefits) was to be inferior to that of the poorest worker.

The new Poor Law created controversy then as does the austerity measures does today. The greatest hostility was in the north of England, who said: “We will not live on water and gruel . . . and we will not endure the idea of men rolling in luxury, prescribing to us the most extreme line which can keep body and soul together.”

The importance of the Poor Law declined with the advent of the Welfare State in the 20th century, and the installation of the National Assistance Board acted as a relief agency.

We can see in the implementation of austerity measures, similar solutions applied to the same problem. The benefit system of these modern times is seen as self-defeating, removing the pressure of want from the poorest in society while leaving them free to live a life of leisure and increase their families with help from the State, thus leading to an unsustainable drain on resources and undermining the living standards of those in work.

Ripon holds a special significance for me, but this my first visit to the Workhouse. It is altogether, a harsh insight into the reality into what real poverty was like and what it meant to be poor in Victorian England.

They say Yorkshire isn’t just a place. Like New York, it is an attitude of mind. Anyone can achieve it. As Jimmy Cliff once musically said: ‘You can get it if you really want. But you must try’. It’s not a unique thought. The Yorkshire outlook has been around since the invention of money.

Yes, happiness is getting what you want and people pursue it with as much vigour as a dog worries a sock. But the key is not wanting too much. Above all, be careful what you wish for; it might be a bit rubbish. Get this thought into your mind and you have already found your Shangri-La.

That rather blinkered view notwithstanding, my favourite place to live in all the world would be Harrogate. For me, it is the perfect town. I know it well, because I boast to all that will listen, that I used to live there. And you can’t beat that!

It is not only said to be the happiest place to live and a fine place to visit, it is too, one of the most expensive. The flat where I use to live – just off the main Stray in Lancaster Road – at around £5 a week (admittedly over 50 years ago) has just been sold for an eye-watering £300,000. Have people taken leave of their senses? But lets move on.

These days, lofts in Harrogate have found their proper function as the perfect living space for top executives and professional money-types to spend what little leisure time they have, when not driving themselves into an early grave, feeling superior and self-regarding.

Other kinds of real estate in this perfect Yorkshire spar town is simply too expensive – even for them. Welcome to what the glossy property brochures in Feather, Smailes & Scales calls: “Funky Living” (for tossers). My words in parenthesis, not theirs.

This is not the quite the same idea as living in the loft with fibreglass lagging, a redundant Christmas tree, and broken old train set; my own fortress of solitude in the loft; or like those bohemian Parisian gaffs of yester-year, where avant-garde artists of the 1920’s lived in virtual squalor. Oh no. These lofts are described as ‘the ultimate in cool contemporary living.’ It’s a snappy phrase that should really catch on. There were no such marvels as ‘a cinema kitchen’ (whatever that may be) in the 1920’s, or a ‘shower pod’, either. Whatever did they do without them?

They are clever these Estate Agents with their sleight-of-mouth huckster charm and snake oil. Luckily for them, the people with the kind of money who buy their wares are not. As the brochure explains to those to whom it needs explaining, you are not so much buying a loft as an ‘attitude’ – something to set you apart from the dull conformity of conventional living with its disciplined order and different rooms for specific purposes. Why cook in a kitchen when you can do the same thing in your living room? It’s much more romantic, and redolent of the bohemian decadence of Paris.

It’s not quite as funky as a loft, but garden flats too are being snapped up as the last word – or the second word, lofts being the first – in funky living.

While talking to a lady a few months ago outside the Oxfam shop in fashionable Montpelier, where I like to park myself while my wife hits the charity shops, she explained to me that when the yuppies moved to Harrogate in their droves driving the house prices up, the developers followed in their wake like Yankee carpetbaggers.

These days, far from being a cheap alternative to buying a semi, loft living has become de rigueur and more expensive to buy per square foot than what I would consider regular living.

And that’s not the half of it. What with everybody wanting a funky life style, there is hardly an unoccupied loft or garden flat to be had in Harrogate. Folks are so desperate to ape each other, they have taken to doing up abandoned former cotton mill factories that have gone out of production because of cheap Asian imports, and had been converted into fancy art galleries, on the incorrect assumption that they will never be used for their original purpose again. I’ll take that bet.

The knock-on effect of that, is that the supplanted art galleries, have had to move their crap out of the former factories and display it in the trendy Harrogate pubs and wine bars, driving the rich but thick, non-cognoscenti drinkers, who don’t know a Rembrandt from Picasso, to drink in their own homes, be they lofts, garden flats, or ex-factories.

A backlash seems inevitable. The pub landlords will strike back and buy up the remaining housing stock to convert into as pubs to lure the punters back. This in turn, will exacerbate the housing shortage and drive the house prices up even further and out of reach of everybody but the super rich and the banks will foreclose on the factory dwellers, who can no longer pay their mortgage.

Meanwhile, the South-East Asian economy, that has been having it too good for too long and making a mint by using cheap labour and poor wages, will find that the people will get sick of being treated like . . . well, like Asians, and will demand more money and better working conditions like the whites.

Their economy will take a dive because the people in the UK will not be able to buy their goods, but will have instead, re-open the factories as cotton mill sweat shops as in the days of the Industrial Revolution, employed the people who use to live in them but have been evicted by the banks, and beat the Asians at their own game.

Britain will occupy India again, which idea will be frowned upon at first, as it goes against our world renowned sense of decency and fair play, but will later be seen as a good thing, because most people will be Asian here anyway and it will bring down the price of curry which will be no bad thing.

Maybe by then, I will be able to afford to live in Harrogate once again.

As we begin, so will we become. Beginnings are emotionally expensive times; the faculties of heart, mind and will, all in high gear. Sometimes the past comes back in a series of sepia magic lantern slides.

Slide 1. Growing up in the doldrums of adolescence, I remember the noisy fury of boys on my first day at School. Making that awkward disrupting dance of adjustment, until I finally learned to dance along. I set about recasting myself to a distinct shape: one what I imagined was the version of myself that was expected, but getting it wrong.

The world of School had two magnetic poles: fear and anger. It was better to show neither.

My first lesson in school was the way the nuns of the order of the Sister’s of Mercy, were eager to practice their nimble expertise at violence on their fledgling charges. The fundamental distinction, was between the maker and the thing being made: the child with its ‘foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart’, was to be transformed into the saint with as many strokes of the cane as was necessary.

I also remember my last. Thus transformed, it seemed that sooner had I learned to cope with the re-formations of youth – the rules and how to break them – it was time to leave, complete with a standard-issue, working class Secondary Modern education.

Things change; world’s end. But the end of the world does not have to be The End of the World. I would be a new person in a new world, although the new me would be no more authentic than the old one. But not quite yet.

Unable to find a job, I went back to school, making a noble but pointless stand against the end of an era. When the final leave-taking of education came, armed with the youthful optimism of the ignorant, I was sure of a seat on the Orient Express of life, that would carry me smoothly and assuredly from the drearily familiar to a successful life of prosperity and ease.

Not all St. Mary’s ‘old boys’ would realise that happy state. Though memories are not records of perfect faithfulness and may fade over time, our deeds become our beaten path. Deeds have an indestructible life, which past actions determine us and much as we determine our actions. For those caught in pincer jaws of the past and the regret of unmade choices, it would be a case of ‘Where did it all go wrong?’

Before Friends Reunited became overtaken by FaceBook as the social media of choice, I received an invitation to attend one those school reunions. I could not remember having any ‘friends’ at school. But pressed so hard by a voice on the phone, who claimed such first-hand acquaintance of me, it was churlish to refuse the invitation.

The venue was The Railway Club in the town centre in Sunderland. On making my entrance, I was met by an oddly familiar sea of faces. When one of them in particular presented themselves to me, I asked him – as this stranger wanted to know – who he was. Did I not recognise him at all? he enquired.

After some gentle hints, it came to me. “Why of course” I said, “the mystery caller”. And as the perspective of the years opened up before me, I saw at the end of it, a more junior likeness of this same man in the school playground, who had me in a head lock and I said, “bloody hell, it’s Steven Chamberlain; is that you in there?” Two fingers in a v-shape, told me it was.

We shook hands on our reunited lives like friends long lost, although he just lived down the road from me and had done so for years and we must have passed each other on many occasions unknowingly. The smiling paradox of old age, is we grow old first in other peoples eyes, before coming to terms with their opinion of you. It takes a vain exercise of will and obstinacy to do otherwise.

A memory, fresh as a newly dug grave, began to clarify itself. In those distant days, we had shared a passion for the same girl, to which tug-of-love, I lost out. In an off-hand way, I was reliably informed that there was plenty more fish in the sea.

I could not help bringing up this tender subject which oddly enough still rankled, when he said, ‘and who do you think she is married to?’. “You?” I offered, in a flash of inspiration. ‘Yeah! me’ said he. ‘And here she is’. Sure enough, there she was indeed. The effects of the fullness of time had made her larger than life, for she had the ample proportions of a Welsh Dresser and was about as mobile.

All the money in the world could not at that moment, have induced me to wish it was otherwise, so much had Time ravaged that lovely face to which my young and foolish heart had pined so fruitlessly, once upon a time. As you see what the rose was in its faded leaves; and as you see what the summer growth of the woods was in their wintry branches; so she could be traced in a woman like her with her hair turned the colour of Payne’s Grey.

Steven moved toward me, as if going for another head lock, said that he would give his left arm if only we could go back to our childhood days. I on the other hand, would have given my right one to prevent it, if meant spending one more hour with him.

We talked in past tenses of childish escapades and adventures that I had otherwise forgotten and linked the past to the present in an agreeable chain – albeit broken in the middle by a margin of some forty years.

Looking around the room at the motley collection of ‘old boys’ and some old girls, it was noticeable that by their own report, all had either done extremely well (one was Chief of Police), or very badly, with no one falling between the two extremes.

This often happens. That is when talking to old acquaintances, no one owns up to being ordinary. So much so, that one begins to wonder what became of all those mediocre people we hung out with in our youth; especially when we find no shortage of them in our maturity.

And then, I found one. He was sitting in the corner with his wife, so excusing myself to Steve, I walked over to introduce myself.

His wife proved herself to be a quick and intelligent woman who rose to meet me and stood at her husband’s arm while he looked as though he was ready to bolt for the door.

It soon transpired that this erstwhile school chum, was either a bit corned beef (deaf) or he had too much beer. To be fair though, the music was a bit loud.

‘Alright Billy? I thought it was you’ I said, recognising the ubiquitous Donkey Jacket he always wore.

‘He’s asking if you’re alright Billy?’ bawled his wife helpfully. But Billy seemed to be quite at a loss to perceive any reason under the sun, why a complete stranger should be smiling, while making such a straight forward enquiry, the two ideas evidently made no connection in his mind. But he did oblige me with a reply:

‘Ah mak’ boilers mate’ he offered, looking around him with a puzzled expression as if one of the same (boilers) had unaccountably vanished.

‘He’s only a labourer you understand. He don’t make ‘em’ the wife butted in. Ignoring her, I asked the would-be boilermaker in my clearest and loudest voice: ‘are you working young Bill?’. Billy again looked to his wife for confirmation of the question over the din of Jumping Jack Flash. Although she must have know the answer, she sportingly put the question back to her husband.

‘Working!’ he exclaimed, still looking for that vanished boiler, while holding fast to my lapel and breathing his beery breath all over me.

Confidentially drawing me closer, like drunks do, Billy said and if to one remotely interested: ‘there’s nay work for boiler-makers a’rund ‘ere mate’.

Of course, I had no idea what had become of boiler making in Sunderland, or where Billy had supposed it had gone; but whatever the case, his expression told me that he seemed quite pleased about the fact and that in his opinion, boiler-making was never coming back and good riddance to them.

In fact, I detected a shyness in admitting, that human nature being what it is, when idle for too long, it has no desire to be relieved of the boredom, or to be diverted by any make-weight amusement in the form of myself.

So, being of no further help to him on the subject of boilers, I made my excuses and left him to his wife, who seemed oblivious to the fact that her husband – or ‘me partner’ as she called him – was half again as useless and lazy as when I last saw him in Standard Four, St. Mary’s Secondary Modern.

For what seemed the longest time, we talked among ourselves, as if our younger selves were dead and gone. As indeed they were. As dead and gone as St. Mary’s School, which had once been our Field of Dreams but were now gone, like tears in the rain, and all within the memory of a man.

Someone had brought in some old photographs. Don’t they always? Looking at them today, is like coming upon a box of old clothes tucked beneath the attic eaves, and upon opening it, finding the outmoded finery captures all too poignantly where, and who, we once were.

So do all things pass away, and by ten o’clock we had shaken hands all round and said our goodbyes, conscious that we were probably seeing each other for the last time. ‘See you again soon. Take care now’. “Yeah! You bet”.

We had crowded into the short compass of a few hours, half a life-time of memories and swore conscientiously to ‘keep in touch’, but breaking in my mind with that old acquaintance forever, I walked quickly towards the door and never looked back.

But I did look back. But now that remembrance can be improved upon. Turned into the actuality of the moment. For the past is a self-referring business; the dramatist valuing their own emotions. Falling in love with his own creation, but quite aware that Life would not turn out as in Literature.

Meanwhile, delivered into middle age all too quickly, life continues to ebb by. Like a piece of diplomatic luggage past the customs. Sometimes it is the smallest pleasure or pain that teaches us that Time can be just as much a fixative as a solvent.

I try to liberate new memories. Like St. Mary’s Becky Thatcher, Sheila Henry in St. Mary’s Standard II; timid and appealing, dueting My Boy with me to Acker Bilk’s Stranger On The Shore: Eros and Thanatos (love and death), never more real than in that moment sublime. And we two, eternally preserved there in time, as in Philip Larkin’s: An Arundel Tomb. Until the end.